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In a landmark announcement issued today, the data protection officials across the European Union found that the way that EU Member States have implemented the data retention obligations in the 2006 EU Data Retention Directive is unlawful.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) this week served a motion to quash dragnet subpoenas that put privacy and anonymity at risk for the operators of dozens of Internet blogs and potentially hundreds of commenters.

"We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002."

Free software is ubiquitous. It runs everywhere on (almost) everything. The question that dominated most of the discussions at the Libre Planet Conference in Boston about a week ago is what now? How can the community capitalize on its achievements to make the movement more inclusive and reconceive the relationship between free software and privacy?

Appalled by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Help the Free Software Foundation build a wiki database of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that we can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops.

Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.

Network Solutions shut off the lights in response to a DMCA notice, after Cryptome published a 22-page Microsoft document outlining how the company stores private user data in its web-connected servers. The document also explains how government agencies can access that personal data.

Few presentations at conferences in the coming years will manage to combine the intellectual depth and delivery skills shown by Eben Moglen in this penetrating analysis of privacy and technology. Moglen poses an important question; namely, what will be the most successful intelligence organizations of the 21st century?

It shouldn't surprise us that systems built to give law enforcement access to private communications could become vectors for malicious attacks. ... the culture of secrecy that increasingly surrounds our government's domestic spying programs not only undermines the rule of law, it's a danger to national security as well.

Has the federal government overreached in tapping social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to investigate possible criminal activity? The non-profit civil liberties' group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn't know, but it's filed suit to find out the scope of the government's investigations.

...we've compiled a list of 51 open source apps that can help protect your identity. Some of these fit into traditional security categories, like anti-spam, anti-virus, and firewalls. Others, like browsers, e-mail, and PDF tools, we've included in this list because they include encryption or other security features that can help you protect yourself.